An automounter allows the binding of a directory name to a filesystm to be delayed until the name is referenced. This can be advantageous merely to reduce the number of simultaneous mounts, but it can improve system reliability, simplify administration and provide transparent redundancy as well. Examples of automouters are autofs (supplied with Linux) and automountd (supplied with SUNOS) Amd is an advanced automounter, with great flexibility. It is the default automounter pre-installed in FreeBSD and is currently maintained for over 100 operating systems by Erez Zadok. As of the fall of 2000, it is at version 6.04.more...
Traditionally, Unix/Linux/POSIX filenames can be almost any sequence of bytes, and their meaning is unassigned. The only real rules are that "/" is always the directory separator, and that filenames can't contain byte 0 (because this is the terminator). Although this is flexible, this creates many unnecessary problems. In particular, this lack of limitations makes it unnecessarily difficult to write correct programs (enabling many security flaws), makes it impossible to consistently and accurately display filenames, causes portability problems, and confuses users. more ....
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